Aunt Shares 22-Year Friendship With Washington Sasquatch

There's a story floating around YouTube right now that I can't stop thinking about, and if you've spent any time in the Pacific Northwest woods, it's going to hit you somewhere deep. A nephew is sharing the account of his aunt, Lorine Maddox, who lived in the timber country above Stevenson in Skamania County, Washington - yes, the same Skamania County that made history back in 1969 when it passed Ordinance No. 69-01, the first law in the United States making it a crime to kill a Sasquatch. Locals didn't think that was funny. They voted for it. The people closest to those mountains looked at the question of whether something big was living up there and decided the safest thing was to make it illegal to shoot. That context matters for everything that follows. Lorine met her Sasquatch in the fall of 1972. She was 21, grieving her father who'd passed that spring, and had taken over his deer feeding station behind the woodshed mostly just to have a reason to walk out there. The grain started disappearing in patterns that weren't bear-like at all. The latch was worked open and set back down. The lid lifted and replaced. Something was taking feed and cleaning up after itself. Then one gray morning she looked up and he was standing against the woodshed, his shoulder clearing the nine-foot eave. The description is striking - more Neanderthal than ape, with a heavy bony brow ridge, a broad prominent nose, and a wide flat humanlike face with no muzzle. Dark rust brown hair shading to charcoal down the back, weathered gray-brown skin, and a torn notch in his left ear. She said his face wasn't an animal's face. He was looking at her the way you look at a problem you're deciding about. She stood very still and let him decide. For 22 years, she fed him at the bottom of that drainage. He wouldn't come past the shed toward the house. And he absolutely would not let her follow him past the second ridge. She tried multiple times that first winter, and every single time he'd materialize uphill of her without a sound, standing across the trail with his back to the high country, just waiting. Not threatening. Not displaying. Just his whole enormous body between her and whatever was up there. Here's where the story takes a turn that genuinely gave me chills. In the spring of 1974, after two years of her saying "good morning" to him every single day, he said it back. Low, wrong, effortful - like the shape of the word was a weight he was lifting. She was so shaken she didn't go back for a week. But she couldn't stand it, and when she returned and said good morning again, he set it back, and that was the rest of her life decided in about four seconds. Over the years he learned maybe 40 words. He never told her a single thing about himself - questions about where he slept or whether there were others fell into silence. But questions about the high country did something worse than silence. He'd go completely still, look up at the ridge, and leave every time. There's a photograph from 1976. In it, Lorine is 25, laughing, with her arms around a Sasquatch over seven feet tall. He has one enormous hand resting on her shoulder, and both of them look happy. The nephew describes it in detail, and the creature in the photo matches exactly what she told him. But the part that really stayed with me is what Lorine came to believe in her final years. She didn't think the Sasquatch was the strange thing in those mountains. She thought he was the wall. She was certain that everything people report from country like that - the screams, the disappearances, the hunters who come back wrong - gets blamed on Bigfoot for one simple reason: Bigfoot is the only thing up there that anyone ever manages to see. The thing he spent his whole long life keeping off her porch never let itself be seen at all. The nephew sat on this story for seven years after she passed in the winter of 2020, because of something she told him at the end that he didn't want to be true. He spent those seven years trying to prove it wasn't. He couldn't. The video also touches on a word the Sasquatch only used in late fall when the larch on the high slopes went gold - the same flat sound he used for winter, but said in October with something under it that the winter word never had the rest of the year. Lorine thought for a long time it just meant the season turning. She was wrong about that, and being wrong about it cost a man his life. The video gets into that, and it's heartbreaking. This is one of those long-form encounter accounts that reminds you why the old-timers in places like Skamania County took the question seriously. It's worth your evening. Go find it, settle in, and listen to the whole thing.